


Boxing Day

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Christmas, Eventual Smut, F/M, Mistletoe, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-06 16:31:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4228908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She drifted to the newsroom out of loneliness. Partially to get away from the pre-decorated Christmas tree that her mother ordered and had sent to her that made her feel pathetic every time she looked at it, but mostly out of loneliness. Will was an unexpected find. Sequel to <i>The Road to Ithaca</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Two Turtle Doves

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** As you can see, this is the sequel to _The Road to Ithaca_ ; it also follows a home theme. Starts out fairly tame, will become explicit later on. Takes place during the December 2010 blizzard, which was very much a thing in the Northeast, starting the day after Christmas and lasting a few days and knocking out power all over the place. This fic starts eight months after the pilot AU, and due to the events of _The Road to Ithaca_ , more than a fair few things are different from in canon. For one, Will never felt the need for his revolving door of dates, and Mac never started a relationship with Wade.

She drifted to the newsroom out of loneliness. Partially to get away from the pre-decorated Christmas tree that her mother ordered and had sent to her that made her feel pathetic every time she looked at it, but mostly out of loneliness. If nothing else, she expected to see whoever on her staff had drawn the short straws to sit at the newsdesk and compile the book over the holiday break, considering the 8 o’clock hour was being covered by a DC weekend anchor until after the New Year and everyone else staffing _News Night_ had been given the week after Christmas off.

A few interns to get friendly with, maybe a desk producer, a copywriter or two.

Will was an unexpected find.

Entirely because she thought he’d be at his sister’s for the holiday — the week between Christmas and New Years is the one week of the year he stands to be within the state of Nebraska’s borders, despite all his frequent exclamations regarding his having sprung forth from it. It’s clear he’s just as surprised to see her, because she’s supposed to be in London with her family, in the house that is none of the ones that she grew up in.

She still laughs about it, sometimes, that she told Will back in April that she just wanted to _come home_. She has no idea what a home is. (It’s not like she ever lived in England before she went to Cambridge, either.) She’s barely ever been in the same _country_ for three consecutive years, let alone the same house or apartment.

Or a newsroom. But this one has been hers for eight months, and it’s beginning to resemble a feeling she thinks she might be able to call _home._

It’s what the two years with Will felt like, it's the feeling she's been trying to return to.

“I saw my parents last month,” she mutters, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Ainsley and her boyfriend were visiting, too. There are just… too many expectations. I would rather not cast a black pall over the Christmas proceedings.”

For a moment Will looks like he wants to ask her a follow-up question, but merely shrugs in agreement and eats another pretzel from the bag he stole off her desk.

After complaining that she only had pretzels, of course.

“How many nieces and nephews do you have now?”

“Jamie and Sheila just had their fourth. So six.” Squinting, she gives up on forcing her eyes to focus on the tiny font on the computer screen; she needs a stronger prescription for her glasses, again. Since she embedded, it feels like her vision has been on a steady decline. Not that it, of course, has anything to do with the fact that she’s entering her late thirties. “Did Mickey ever marry the Norwegian girlfriend?”

Will’s been spit balling personal questions at her since she first found him sitting at his desk and he followed her out of his office, to the coffeemaker and into her office, taking one the seats across from her desk.

“He’s freezing his ass off in Minnesota with her and their twin boys,” he answers in lieu of a clear affirmative, which means that he’s still beating her by two.

“Liz still trying to set you up with her residents?” Mac asks, exiting out of the windows on her screen but not being quite able to look at him, instead diverting her gaze to the windows and the thick curtain of snow falling outside of them.

She knows she needs to leave soon, that a state of emergency has already been declared by the governor, but the blizzard conditions haven’t started yet. Going back to her apartment to get snowed in for a few days isn’t something she exactly wants to do when she can talk to Will instead, dance around his possibly-existent love life in conversation with him — he hasn’t gone on a date since the spring, after a flurry of dates that she assumes were some strange dominant assertion that he’s _over_ her. It was enough to prove a point, that he’s willing to forgive but not to forget, and to be honest it’s not like she can fault him for that, either. His friendship is enough. (Or so it will be, until it isn't. She'll figure out what to do then.) 

Maybe he stayed in the city for Christmas because of a woman.

“Nah, I’m too old for them now. She’s moved onto the fellows,” he says, and then frowns. “But still prime breeding stock, of course.”  

“Telling them that you had to deal with raising them first is wearing thin?” she asks with a careful tone, attempting to maintain a balance between humor and posing, well, an actual question. 

“It was wearing thin twenty years ago,” he replies with a dry sort of laugh, scrubbing his hands over his face. And she remembers, of course. She was the first woman he had brought home since law school, and it showed in his overbearing (if not entirely well-meaning, protective and eager to pay off perceived debts) younger siblings. “It’s not just a _get over it_ situation.”

“I’m getting acquainted with that feeling.” In more way than one. “Did you tell them you have nine millennial senior staffers who are hard enough to manage? You know, you could probably pass off one of our blondes as some wayward lovechild from your spotty youth.”

Will snorts.

“Tess?”

“I was thinking Maggie,” Mac answers breezily, looking out the windows again. “But you’re right, she may be too short.”

She really, really needs to at least _consider_ leaving soon. Her building may only be five blocks away but it’s not a trek that she wants to make in gale-force winds with snow freezing to her face, even if she’s made journeys in worse conditions, and the taxis are going to stop running soon, if they’re even running now.

“Yeah, it’s getting nasty out there, not that our own weather people felt like predicting shit at all, I mean really. Six to eight inches my ass,” Will comments, lightly, and she realizes the worrying frown she’s wearing. “When are you thinking of heading home?”

He’s from _Nebraska,_ he’d remind her, and not at all afraid of a little snow. He’s from Nebraska, from a _farm,_ from hardy Irish breeding stock. Even if he currently lives forty blocks downtown. He probably packed snow shoes in his briefcase, even though she sees that he wore loafers to the office today.

“I don’t know,” she says, after realizing that she’s gnawed a nice little cut into her bottom lip, and sighs. “Maybe I’ll just get stuck here, sleep on the floor, forage in the break room for Jim’s stale pop tarts and whatever else is lying about that isn’t growing anything green and fuzzy on it.”

The expression on his face creases into one that could be described as concerned. “That… hardly sounds like a good plan.”

When are her plans ever _good?_

She scoffs.

“You should probably go home,” he continues, prodding a pretzel rod in her direction.

“You first,” she mumbles. And then glares at him. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“I’d hate to come back on New Year’s and find your thawing corpse in the fetal position under your desk,” he says with a lackadaisical shrug and a sort of nonchalance festooned with the usual snark.

She purses her lips at him to hide the unwanted smile threatening to upturn the corners of her mouth, and narrows her eyes.

“Thanks.”

He grins.

“You’re welcome.”

MacKenzie tries very hard not to focus on his smile, nor the tight sleeves of his blue sweater, or the way it pulls over the broad angles of his shoulders when he gestures. “Apparently you just don’t want to stumble upon my rotting flesh.”

“I’m sure you’d make a beautiful dead body, but I prefer you living,” he continues, fanning the fingers on one hand in general direction before crossing his arms. “Breathing, with pink skin and the nice hair and everything.”

“You sure know how to compliment a woman, Billy,” she deadpans, rolling her eyes.

“I know.” His voice slides into laughter, and she can’t help but to laugh with him. Then he braces his hands on the arms of the chair, and stands. “And I said _thawing,_ not rotting. There’s a distinction. I made you a very pretty corpse in this hypothetical scenario, which is not going to come to fruition, because we are both going to go home now.”

She looks up at him, distinctly unimpressed.

But mostly unwilling to leave — they made the two interns manning the newsdesk leave an hour ago, and she’s been printing out the wire reports for the book since then, with Will (having abandoned any pretense of doing work) sitting five feet away from her.

“You do understand I made it twenty-six months in various combat zones, correct?”

“You were with armed Marines. Sadly all you have now is me.” When he realizes that she’s not going to get up, he rounds her desk, extending a hand. “Also that was the desert.”

Mac just looks at his hand, smirking when he pouts at her.

“Some of the time it was the mountains, where there is snow,” she corrects him.

“None of your arguments, we’re both going to go home before we can't,” he says, which is just _rich_ coming from him, the former prosecutor (which probably explains how much he knows about corpses) who can find a way to split any conversation into a debate over the facts, paying no matter to _the fact_ that _that_ particular predisposition is half the allure to her, anyway.

He all but picks her up out of her desk chair, his fingers curled gently around her wrists as he steadies her into standing. But he doesn’t stop touching her, even after it looks like he’s certain that she’s not about to fall over. That’s the one thing that hasn’t changed much — the subtle graze of his fingers against her, one of his hands reaching out for her. A hand on her lower back, an arm around her shoulders. More than that, when he found her mid-flashback in a dark editing bay on a Saturday and held her close for almost an hour, until she could breathe.

Not to mention when she cried on him in the stairwell on her first day at ACN.

Will presses his hand into the small of her back, reaching for her coat and the rest of her things, and hands them to her before ushering her out of her office.

“How exactly do you intend on ensuring that I just don’t die en route to my apartment and the sanitation department finds my frozen husk three days from now?” she asks, shrugging into her coat while trying not to drop her scarf or gloves. “I don’t think the cabs are still running.”

Then Will stops walking.

Half a second after he stops them short, Mac follows his gaze up to the top of the doorway to her office, her cheeks immediately flushing pink.

“Oh. I guess—” she starts, and then bites her lip, examining the mistletoe hanging over their heads. “Tess. She’s been the one hanging it all week. She must have moved it before leaving for her flight Christmas Eve.”

It must have been Tess. Or Tamara. Even Kendra or Martin or Maggie. They all seem to be in on it, along with the rest of the dollar store holiday decorations that have been cropping up in the bullpen for Hanukkah and Christmas since early December.

“I mean, we don’t have to—” Will stutters.

“Right,” Mac agrees, even if she does notice that his hand isn’t leaving her lower back. “It’s just a silly—”

“And no one’s even here,” he supplies.

She giggle nervously, remembering last Thursday. And then Tuesday. “Especially not Charlie.”

Who had been standing not ten feet away from them when they walked under it when it had been hanging in the door of the supply closet, and her printer had run out of toner and Will hadn’t felt like stopping mid-debate with her to wait for her to come back. She had blushed then too, because Charlie yelled at Will to _kiss her like you mean it, William Duncan McAvoy_ and so Will did, his hands on her waist and his mouth on hers for a mind-addling amount of time, bending her back over his arm before letting her go.

And promptly fleeing to his own office, leaving her to stand there gaping at the smirking staff.

“I’m still sorry for that, you know,” he says, looking down at his shoes. “Probably constituted workplace harassment, and everything. Or something. Probably everything, consent issues notwithstanding.”

“They’ve just been hanging it in good fun,” she mumbles, fingering the fringe at the end of her scarf. “The Christmas spirit, as some would say. Although it appears that neither of us has much of it, since we’re both here.”

“Yeah.” He grins in a small way then, before his features give way to mild exasperation. “But three times now? You’d think they were targeting us.”

Last Thursday had been the first time they got stuck under the mistletoe, while arguing with each other about the A-block in the conference room. The senior staff jeered, and it was… perfunctory, Mac thinks. Perfunctory, like they hadn’t fallen out of practice of quick kisses and cursory affection, and they’d hardly stopped the verbal sniping as she leaned up onto her tip toes to brush her lips against his.

That had been nice too, but stands in stark contrast in her mind to Tuesday.

“Oh,” she finds herself saying, voice faltering. “Well, um — we should just — go home. Like you were saying.”

“Yeah.”

Swallowing hard, he nods, looking at her again.  

“It’s not even Christmas anymore. Does it even still — doesn’t it have an expiration date?” she asks, letting him help her into her coat, wrap her scarf around her neck.

“Technically it’s the second day of Christmas now,” he points out, looking up at the mistletoe again. “Two turtle doves, and everything. But I don’t really know how it all works.”

“Right.”

Feeling her heart plunk into her stomach, she waits another moment, just hoping. But no one else is here to pressure him into it, no well-intentioned staff and no matchmaking Charlie. As much as she longs to feel his lips on hers, his body pressing up against her own, his hands roaming into her hair, down her shoulders, to her waist and her hips — Will has forgiven her. But he doesn’t want to be with her. Their kisses were comfortable because they’ve done it before, they know each other’s bodies as well as talking points and the nightly rundown.

Smiling, she looks at him and takes a step out of the doorway, nervously clutching at her leather gloves.

Will catches her again, his hands framing her sides and pulling her back. Before she can formulate a thought, a word, even a breath — he’s kissing her, sliding his hands up her back and his fingers into the hair at the base of her skull. Gently, almost, not like he wants to hold her there but like he’s trying to find the right angle and she knows a second before he slides his tongue into her mouth that he’s going to do it.

Her purse drops from the crook of her elbow to the ground, and she wraps her arms around his neck, lifting herself as tall as she can be — she dragged her combat boots out from the back of her closet, her snow boots still be in storage somewhere in DC or London or some other godforsaken place where she's been keeping her life on hold. There’s an extra inch in the soles, but not the three or four that she’s used to. He'll have to come down to her, and does, steadies her, moving one hand down under her jacket, under her sweater, his fingers fanning out over her hip.

It goes on, without a reason to stop.

No one else is here, and they’re committed to it, or so it seems. Or at least committed to not thinking about  _it_ , about anything that isn't the kiss itself as it goes on, and on. And God, she thinks briefly, an opaque fluttering thought that appears as she nips at his lower lip before soothing it with her tongue, why would she want to? They can think later, but she's been so lonely for months, lonely with her thoughts and regrets, therapy appointments and medications. And she knows he has been too.  _  
_

Eventually it does end, by mutual decision. One of them runs out of breath, and then the other, and he kisses her cheek before pulling back. “I… um…”

Laughing, he shakes his head, apparently at himself. Lightheaded and disoriented, Mac laughs too, dropping down from her tiptoes. Cupping her face with his hands, he strokes his thumbs over her cheekbones.

“That’s not exactly _incentive_ for me to go back to my apartment,” she manages to get out. He laughs harder, ducking his head to kiss her again, more quickly this time. When he pulls his mouth away  from hers this time he doesn’t pull away completely, trailing a blaze of kisses along her jawline to her ear. “Really, _really,_ not an incentive for me to go back to my apartment.”

He sighs.

“Will?”

Winding his arms around her waist, over her blouse but under her Fair Isle sweater, he looks at her. His expression is earnest, but still somewhat uncertain.

“I’m considering the finer merits of getting snowed in together,” he says.

A thrill of anticipation bolts through her. It’s impulsive, and probably stupid, and nothing like the reticence they’ve been showing the past eight months — willing to concede to simple touches and lingering looks and innuendo, but dancing away from _it_ the moment it becomes a tangible thing within their reach.

“My apartment _is_ much closer than yours,” she answers, rocking back onto her heels. “Who knows if you could get downtown, with the weather getting this bad.”

Nodding, he pulls her closer. “Good point.”

“So um…”

She licks her lips, planting her arms on his chest.

“Yeah.” He nods again. “Let’s go to your place.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	2. I'll Hold Your Hands (They're Just Like Ice)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you to all who left comments and kudos on the first chapter! Much appreciated. Unfortunately, unlike during the school year, this fic will probably only be updated once a week. Funny what happens when employment gets in the way of your writing time. But I thank you all in advance for your patience.

He should have worn better shoes. When he left his apartment this morning he hadn’t intended to stay for nearly as long as he did — he meant to go into the office, grab a stack of reports he’d forgotten to take with him on Christmas Eve, and head home before the hood of the company car could even start to cool.

That didn’t happen.

He was sitting at his desk for barely ten minutes when Mac pushed into his office, startling when she realized he was present within it. Sometime after that — he’s not entirely sure when, probably when he decided to follow her into her office and sit down rather than scoff at her for showing up in the newsroom the day after Christmas with the intention to work — he texted his driver, telling him to go home before the storm hit, that he’d be fine to take a cab.

They were definitely not fine to take a cab.

That is, they were not able to _find_ a cab. And even though MacKenzie’s apartment is only five city blocks (she repeated that, multiple times, while wrapping and re-wrapped her scarf around her face until he realized she wasn’t just being neurotic, she was trying to remember something she once was taught, probably by a _Marine_ ) from the AWM building he’s wearing fucking loafers, because he’s a dumbass.

But not too much of a dumbass. He did wear gloves and a hat. And a scarf, that Mac wound tightly around his neck until he worried he was starting to asphyxiate, and loosened it slightly. He’s also wearing jeans, which soaked through within two minutes of being out in the wind and snow, but he remembers that Mac did have a washer and dryer at her apartment, or at least used to before she fled the state in 2007 and sublet to God-only-knows-who. (She really doesn’t know. He asked once, and she shrugged, saying that she didn’t even think about calling a real estate agent to put her apartment up for rent until she was a month into Peshawar and realized that her war reporter salary wasn’t going to cover her bills.) Will can’t see Mac ripping out a washer and dryer hook-up. Especially not MacKenzie, who’s so particular (read: _neurotic_ ) about how each article of clothing of hers is washed.

Or at least that’s what he’s trying to focus on, not the fact that he _kissed_ MacKenzie (and not just a brief peck on the cheek, but with teeth and tongue and more than once, on her mouth and jaw and neck) and then instructed her to lead them back to her apartment to get snowed in together for the next few _days._

And it’s not like he regrets it — he’s just nervous. Because there are things he should be telling her, she should be holding him to more than a kiss. MacKenzie never lets him just get away with the bare minimum, but she’s letting him, just like how she’s letting him lead the way to her building, past frosted windows and emptied-out shops, along hollow streets bearing no other signs of life but the dim glow of street lamps and illuminated store signs. 

Her fingers squeeze around his, and he squeezes back.

His arm ends up tangled with hers, and Mac brings their hands up to her chest, anchoring herself to his side.

“You okay?”

All he can see of her face is her eyes and the sliver of skin between her cheekbones and the tip of her nose, but he’s never really needed her face to gauge how fine she is or not. And while a phone call at two in the morning is almost always its own indicator even before he can hear her voice (it’s an accident of clumsy fingers, because she programmed his and Jim’s numbers on speed dial right next to one another, but when she mistakenly called him the first time after waking up from a nightmare he wasn’t exactly going to let her _hang up_ , either) he does also have to rely on just being able to read her voice for an hour, five times a week.

Mac shivers, and shrugs, resting her head against his shoulder. “Two more blocks,” she says, looking down at his shoes.

He steadfastly ignores the sensation that appears to accompany one’s toes turning into icicles.

“We don’t have to do this, if you don’t—”

“I want to,” she answers immediately, defensively, and in a way that does not exactly connote that she is one hundred percent certain of her choice. But of course, he thinks. Of course she’s nervous too.

Blinking into the bitter cold wind, he tries to think of a way to reassure her.

“You seem skittish.”

He realizes that was probably not it.

Mac bristles under her coverings of a knitted fur-lined hat and cashmere scarf. “Do you not want to—?”

He also realizes that trying to have a significant conversation about the status of their relationship should wait until they are somewhere private and _inside_ , not in the midst of chilling winds and endless waves of thick snowflakes. But inside might be too late, if Mac needs to back out of this, and to be honest the middle of a blizzard is private enough that he can barely hear his own thoughts, let alone the words coming out of Mac’s mouth.

Pulling her closer, he leans down to her ear. “I can get a hotel room; you live next to Times Square. Mac, if this is too fast or—”

“Will, it’s been almost six years.” she says flatly. “This isn’t too fast.”

He frowns. “Six? Where are you getting six from? We broke up almost four years ago.”

“I was going from when we first got together,” she tensely explains, and he feels her shoulder turn rigid where it's pressed into his arm. “I mean, even if we’re counting from when I came back that’s eight months and that’s still not fast by anyone’s metric. I’m just—”

When she doesn’t continue, merely shrugging, he asks, “Just what?”

“Worried. I guess.” Heaving a lopsided breath, she pulls her scarf down to reveal her mouth. Setting her lips into a grim line, she looks ahead, worry lines etching themselves into the space between her eyebrows. “Last time, we didn’t exactly start off on the same page, which is entirely _my fault_ before you get going on that topic. I just. I mean — I know we’re talking now, but I don’t think I can just — what are we even doing?”

Will has no fucking clue. He’s been wondering that every day for the past eight months, since he let the words _I forgive you_ stumble off his tongue without his brain’s permission. He doesn’t know what they’re doing, and it might be easier if he loved her any less.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t, and he doesn’t know why he didn’t go to Nebraska this year to spend the holidays with Liz and her family and the rest of _their_ family. Except he does, because as soon as he heard Mac on the phone with her youngest sister explaining that she was needed at the studio and that the flights just wouldn’t work, he made up his own lame excuse, ignoring the way the idea of Mac alone in her apartment, Jim visiting his own family in Delaware, and him in Nebraska made his stomach twist into a solid knot.

_What if?_

So he decided to stay, after she panicked during the middle of watching the video from the Moscow riots in the editing bay, flinging her arms back as she tried to escape whatever was replaying in her head from Islamabad and smashing the face of her watch in the process.

Then he went to Tiffany’s, and bought her a new watch. Ostensibly for Christmas.

“Going back to your apartment,” he finally says, wracking his mind for some way to soothe her that doesn’t involve kissing her again, because clearly _that_ has not solved any of their problems. “It can be more than that, if you want. Or it can be less. And it’s not — Jesus, Mac, I know you’re sorry, I read your—”

He stops.

“Read my what?” Mac asks, her eyebrows knitting together.

“Fuck.”

“Will?”

He blames the slip-up on the fact that most of his extremities have gone numb, quite possibly including his head. “I read your emails.”

MacKenzie’s expression works methodically through a few distinct emotions, most notably shock, and then anger. “So you lied to me, in your office? On my first day, you said—”

“I read them _after_ that, I didn’t lie to you.” Will cringes, unthinkingly twining their fingers more tightly together, praying that she doesn’t try to pull her hand away because he’ll let go, he just… doesn’t want to. “I just never told you that I… I read them. After the first time you accidentally called me. Instead of Jim.”

Swallowing hard, her eyes blink closed. Then she sighs, biting her lower lip, and stops walking.

“So you know… everything,” she says slowly. “And you didn’t say anything.”

“I’m sorry.”

He tamps down on the reflex to refuse to apologize, the reflex to entrench himself into moral high ground, to find a way to be right. And that, maybe, is because after much berating from Charlie (after much liquor was poured into him by Charlie, after Charlie made it seem like it was a good idea to bend Mac back over his arm in front of fifty people and for some reason his brain actually did click off and listen to Charlie for a few minutes, and fuck wasn’t that _awkward_ for Mac, he’s certain, in addition to probably fitting the textbook definition of sexual harassment in the workplace) he finally mustered up the gumption on Christmas Eve to give Mac the thousand dollar watch he bought her.

Maybe is because she shyly gave him a prop from the original run of _Man of la Mancha_ in return, is because she was wearing the watch today.

Because, because, because.

Because… maybe he finally has a reason to be sorry for more than the fact that he loves her.

“No, they were — they were addressed to you. I sent them to you. I’m glad you read them,” she responds, voice stilted. “You just… walked into work the next day like nothing had happened?”

“I finally started going back to my therapy appointments the next day, and _then_ I walked into work like nothing had happened,” he explains, leaving out the minor detail that he had been away from his psychiatrist for so long that the man had passed away and it hadn’t even registered on his radar. Just so long as his Xanax prescription kept refilling. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

She looks up at him with baleful eyes.

“That was almost six months ago! You couldn’t think of a way to—”

“You wrote that you never stopped loving me,” he interrupts, because that’s the one point he’s been bringing up Wednesday morning after Wednesday morning, like the one last piece of a puzzle he hasn’t been able to cram into place.

MacKenzie looks at him like he’s crazy, a desperate sheen glazing over her eyes. “Yes.”

And even if he can’t help but think that he could have been in a similar position had she not told him eight months ago that it really was her holding up the signs at Northwestern…

“I don’t get it. Then why did you tell me about—?”

“I didn’t tell you about Brian to break up with you. I wrote that, too. More than once,” she answers fiercely, pulling her arm out of his grasp. He hasn’t seen her like this in months, his beleaguered and traumatized optimist, medicated out of her anger. “I fell in love with you. I stopped answering his calls because I realized I deserved better, I realized that I fell in love with you, and you deserved better too. That’s why I told you. And then you kicked me out of your apartment and took a job at ACN. So maybe realize that from my point of view, you were the one breaking up with me even if I was the one who made the mistake.”

And that, he thinks, is the reason. There’s more to it than that, issues that the junior Habib (which Will realizes is a much more charitable nickname that what he usually calls his therapist) likes to push and prod about with his father and how it’s betrayal, not rejection, and how MacKenzie has proved over and over again her trustworthiness and how maybe she wasn’t the only one who would have to make concessions.

Shit. _Shitshitshit._

The wind howls in his ears, and he finds himself shivering, watching her eyes water and her nose and cheeks dot with pinpricks of color.

“What are you—?”

Wordlessly, he pulls her into the alley just ten feet ahead of them down the block and out of the wind.

“I can barely hear you, and you’ll freeze out there,” he mumbles. “Just… come here.”

“We don’t have to do this out here, we don’t have to do this at all, I’m sorry I’m just—”

“Scared and picking a fight?” Will mutters, slogging through six inches of snowdrift already piling up against the wall. “Yeah, I’m good at that one too. I’m sure _your_ psychiatrist has covered it as well.”

She kicks at a chunk of ice with the tip of her boot. “Yeah.”

“You weren’t… the only one who made mistakes.” He tries not to balk at saying that out loud, but this instinct is one the first ones he formed as a child, and it’s hard to shed. “I surgically excised you from my life. That was my choice. That’s on me, no matter if I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. Now I know it wasn’t. For either of us.”

She pulls her scarf all the way down past her chin, and then shoves her hands into her pockets. “I don’t blame you. For that. Just so you know.”

“You got stabbed, MacKenzie,” he says slowly, because he knows she will never be able to forget it and she can’t pretend like she can, he knows what kind of shit you can put behind you and what will make you regret surviving when it keeps coming after you, night after day after night. “You almost died. You wake up screaming, you have flashbacks, and that’s just the shit you haven’t been able to hide from me.”

“That was _my_ choice,” she replies, too steady in his opinion, in her unwavering dedication to shouldering blame. It’s been only eight months, but it’s already become her main thrust of her identity; he wonders if that is the result of almost losing her career. “I made the choice to sleep with Brian while I was with you. I made the choice to go over to the Middle East. I made the choice to embed with Special Forces.”

He could point out that she won a Peabody, along many other awards, from her vantage point with the special forces, but he doesn’t think it will eclipse the fact that she _almost lost her fucking career_ to PTSD, and he just… he knows.

He knows that the feeling that she still might lose it hasn’t gone away yet.

The feeling that her mind might still betray her, that she still might lose everything, that she still might lose him; they cannot just go back to her apartment for a quick fuck and a cigarette afterwards. This can’t be _just sex_ when it feels to her like it’s a gamble. But she also feels like she can’t ask him for more.

 _Fuck,_ he thinks.

“Mac, you’re more Catholic than I am. Which is, considering the circumstances, actually absurd, but regardless. You know that the saints and martyrs only ever end up bloody, and alone and that’s if they’re not dead, and I’m not going to let you — you’re not alone.” And then he steels himself, winding his arms around her waist, over the many layers of clothing separating them. “I love you.”

Surprise grips her features. Through the heavy curtains of snow (catching on her eyelashes, her cheeks, her lips, swirling all around them) her mouth parts slightly, her breath escaping in grey wisps.

“What?”

It’s his turn to gape his mouth open. In the cold, his top lip has cracked, and he traces the small laceration with his tongue.

“I never stopped loving you, I just… was an incredible asshole for a while.” Sliding his hands up her back, he realizes almost immediately that he’s rambling, but dedicates himself to the purpose even if he has not a fucking clue of what to tell her.

Snow continues falling down onto their heads, clinging desperately to their clothes for respite from the ground; his jeans have soaked through and are clinging to his thighs and shins. Mac at least was smart enough to wear a knee-length jacket and to tuck her pants into her boots; he feels the water the snow melting into the hems of his jeans slowly creeping up his calves.

He very much wants to be inside a building already.

Any building.

Aiming for earnest, he continues, “So if you want, this isn’t just us going back to your apartment together. If you want. If you don’t, if you’re not able to do this right now, I can find a hotel room, and we can pretend this didn’t happen. I can wait. I’m not going to stop loving you. But we are standing out in a blizzard and my shoes are filling with ice so if you could make a decision soonish I would really appreciate that.”

Relief clearing the cloud of anxiety from her face, she nods, certain now. “Yes. We should go back to my apartment.”

It takes a long moment for him to register what she’s saying.

“Thank God.”

Things don’t go this easily for them.

But then again, having this conversation in the middle of a state of emergency may not exactly be one person’s idea of _easy._ Just theirs, subject to the whims of a piece of chaos that’s not of their own making. It's almost a comfort, considering their own personal histories. 

Elated maybe, at least with some of his nerves ameliorated, he pulls her closer. Smoothing her scarf all the way back from her face, he leans down to kiss her again. It’s tempting to frame her face with his hands, but he remembers all the ice that must be frozen to the palms of his gloves, and keeps his hands at the small of her back instead, letting her guide him into pushing her against the wall of alley.

It’s lips and tongue and teeth again, and her hands sliding up under his hand so she can card her fingers through his hair, his body protecting her from the chill of the storm.

“I thought you said your shoes were filling with ice,” she murmurs a long moment later.

He laughs. “Really?”

His feet are mostly numb, but it hardly matters.

“Come on,” Mac says, pushing them away from the wall, re-wrapping her scarf around her face.  “What was even your plan to get home?”

For some reason, he doubts that Mac will be amenable to the fact that he didn’t exactly have a _plan,_ per se. So instead he tucks her scarf around her face and neck more tightly, brushing off clumps of snow and then straightening her hat.

“I um… wasn’t really going to stay. Then you showed up. And then I wanted to make sure that you made it home safely.”

“By… making sure that you couldn’t?”

“Mac, there are like twelve hotels within a one block radius of work,” he points out, rubbing his hands up and down her arms. “You’re the one who wanted to tough it out by sleeping under your desk.”

“I have a go bag and a pillow in my office. There’s food — or well, sort of — in the break room.”

He really wants to argue that stale pop tarts don’t really count as food, but then he’d be invalidating his diet of choice during his second year of law school.

“What if the power went out?” he asks instead.

Mac snorts, rolling her eyes. “I could have walked across the street to the Hilton.”

“And what if _their_ power was out?”

At this point he’s just being annoying. Probably. Maybe not, since she takes his hand again and starts dragging them out of the alleyway and in the direction of her building.

She sighs. “I lived in Marine barracks in a desert, not to mention damp caves and various tents, I really think I would have made it.”

“Yes, I am aware you _could have_ done it, hon, but maybe the point is you have a bed and blankets and candles and you know, an apartment with a stable generator and everything just five blocks uptown.”

True to form, she ignores his response with a vague wave of her hand. “ _But_ thank you. For making me leave. Now shut up.”

He doesn’t intend to.

(Really.)

But when she slips stepping down off the curb, he takes the opportunity to hold her close, and forgets what his retort is. Whatever it is, it can probably wait until they are both warm and dry, and able to insult the other without trying to make themselves heard over the battery of snow and sleet and wind beating down over Manhattan.

“Copy,” he says as an afterthought, noticing that it's  _her_ pulling _him_ along now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	3. Heedless of the Wind and Weather

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** So apparently job-hunting and interviewing while working full-time and trying to apartment hunt and set-up how to pay your student loans is stressful and time-consuming. Who knew? Additional note: there are a few ficlets of a West Wing!Newsroom AU on my tumblr under the tag #tell me im your national anthem, if anyone is interested. 
> 
> Thank you all for waiting.

They tumble into the elevator, gloved hands pressed into each other’s sides. Her doorman is discrete, as is her building manager — and would have to be, in an apartment building less than two blocks from Times Square. The weather, too, helps their cause of anonymity. Or so MacKenzie thinks, remembering the press of Will’s body against her own pushing her into the brick wall of the Wells Fargo at Sixth and West 45th.

She pushes him up against the rail, laughing as he pulls her scarf away from her mouth and manages to rip it off her entirely in his haste. It flutters from her shoulders down to the floor, coming to rest across her icy boots.

“Patience is a virtue,” she murmurs.

Regardless, she unbuttons his coat and then tears her gloves off her hands so she can slide her fingers under the hem of his damp sweater.

Will repays her by pulling her closer, bending press a chain of kisses from the apex of her jaw to her lips. “It really isn’t.”

She gasps.

“Some of us are less impulsive than others, you know,” she reasons. As if to prove her point, Will ducks his head to fit his mouth against her pulse. The kiss is open-mouthed, his tongue dancing over the taut line of her throat, and she bites back a moan. “Some of us don’t go around bending women back over their arms when they get caught under the mistletoe.”

He snorts against her neck. “You started it.”

At first she thinks he’s referring to the second kiss as well, but then remembers that she _was_ the one who initiated the idea that they would concede to this tradition. She could wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t brushed her lips against his that day in the conference room, mid-argument, but she won’t. Besides, she thinks they’ve been inching towards this for months now. If not mistletoe, something else would have occurred to lead them here.

If not today, then maybe at the New Year’s party, or Valentine’s Day.

(Holidays, bank or federal or otherwise, have always seemed to spur Will to new heights of emotional impulse, leading him to act with very little forethought and but with great commitment. Not that she only but ever rarely minds this occasional tendency to shed his hard legalistic shell.)

“That was a peck,” she counters. “On the corner of your mouth. Completely appropriate for a workplace environment.”

Not that she and Will should be _anyone’s_ shining exemplar of workplace conduct.

Her secondary argument (“The _staff_ were the ones that started it, besides I thought we could keep a handle on, you know, a chaste kiss like adults who happen to be friends”) is covered by his mouth. Renewing her interest in shoving him up against the wall of the elevator, she jams her gloves into her coat pockets to better be able to slide her hands into his damp hair, keeping his lips locked against hers.

They reach her floor a few moments after that.

The elevator dings open; Will sucks her lower lip into his mouth, releases it, and then pushes back from the wall. “Not what I think the senior staff, and in particular order — Maggie, Tess, Tamara, Neal, Kendra, Martin, and Gary — wanted to see.”

With an increasing sense of vagueness (her head feels increasingly frozen, her thoughts coming to an icy standstill, or perhaps just clogged with snowflakes) she rolls her eyes at Will, exiting the elevator.

He follows, of course.

“You left out Jim,” she says.

“Jim hates me,” he counters gamely, and then frowns. “Or I’m pretty sure he hates me. He at least deeply resents me, which I can respect.”

She snorts. “Noticed that, did you?”

“The glares and clenched fists? Would be hard to miss.”

The front door to her apartment is a scant twenty feet down a golden wallpapered hallway; his hand rests on her lower back the entire way, and when she leans down to extract her keys from her bag he attaches his mouth to her neck again.

“You missed your entire staff quitting eight months ago,” she comments dryly.

He sweeps her hair away to uncover a small patch of skin between her scarf and her hat, and sinks his teeth into it, laughing lowly when she squirms and fails to accurately line up her key into the lock. “Do you just say this shit to argue with me?”

It’s her turn to laugh then. Swatting him away, she manages to unlock the door and push it open, reaching to the side to flip on the light switch before letting him push them into her entryway.

“I don’t know, do you?”

He pretends to consider it. “Yes.”

The sound that comes out of her then is a shrieking sort of giggle, not really appalled but an artifice of an objection — if they aren’t in disagreement over three or four things at any given time, are they really trying at their relationship at all? He smiles, and helps her pull off her over things and coat, smiling wider when he drops them to the floor with a wet _plop_ , silently challenging her to pick them up again.

Mac kicks at her sopping coat until it presses up against his legs.

“You’re a twelve year old boy,” she says, in a tone that someone could construe as fond, before remembering an earlier point. “And, who cares if it’s what the staff wanted to see or not? You just wanted an excuse. Twelve year old.”

“Pulling on your pigtails?”

Will backs her up against the wall of her entryway, reaching his hands up into her wet hair. Sliding his fingers against his skull, he gives a slight tug at her roots and she shivers for a reason that isn’t the residual cold chilling her bones.

“I have never in my life worn pigtails,” she murmurs, flickering her gaze between his eyes and his mouth.

(It’s a lie; she knows he’s been exposed to enough pictures of her as a child and waits for him to call her on it.)

Leaning down over her, he brings their lips back together. The door still within her reach, she makes sure that the deadbolt is secure, and then lands her hands on his shoulders. Then moves them to his chest, undoing the buttons on his jacket and slipping her hands beneath, finding the satin lining wet through and his sweater cold, and soaked.

He doesn’t object when she shoves his coat off his shoulders to join hers on the laminate floor of her entryway. He doesn’t stop kissing her, either; MacKenzie is starting to think that getting snowed in together is the best idea they’ve had all year.

His hands come to rest on her hips, and she feels a jolt of electricity spark between them. And then feels something else, and is sorely tempted to make a shrinkage (or lack thereof) joke, but decides that her tongue is better engaged elsewhere. Pushing up onto her tiptoes, she wraps her arms around his neck and decides to engage her hands as well, cradling the base of his skull in her fingers and pulling their mouths into a tighter fit.

They should probably start moving towards her bedroom or at least her couch (at this point she’d also settle for her dining room table), but she really likes having Will’s tongue in her mouth again.

For the third time.

This afternoon.

But after four years, of course, she reminds herself. She’s not being silly at all, kissing him like they’re trying to forget how to breathe as he pulls at her clothes. When his hands trip up her front and cup her breasts, thumbs rubbing over her nipples, she moans.

Will pulls away then, looking down at her cleavage, appearing both rumpled and triumphant.

“I seem to remember your mother showing me some pictures in an album…”

Cocking her head, she pushes him away. And then saunters deliberately into her living room. For a brief, desolate moment she’s too aware of the changes in her apartment between now and four years ago — the furniture more minimalist, definitely sparse. Darker, with sharper corners. But still warm, she thinks. And she has a nice couch, if only because Jim was stuck crashing on it for a month so she let him pick it out and now she’s stuck with an overstuffed suede reclining monster.

But that’s before getting into the five by eight service portraits of boys she still writes to and boys she buried in Afghanistan and Iraq, lined up in their gold and silver frames on her bookshelves.

So she starts rambling instead, falling into her couch and plucking apart the knots in her shoelaces before ridding herself of her sweater and unbuttoning her blouse.

“You say these things, but I know that Fiona wouldn’t object to making sure a certain picture of you made it onto your Wikipedia page,” she says, squinting at the memory of her one trip to Lincoln, years ago. “You know, the one of you after your second year of university, wearing nothing but boots and overalls, posing atop a tractor in a cornfield — I swear, I could tell the staff you were posing for a calendar for the Nebraska football team and I think they’d believe me. What were you even…?”

He appears to follow her lead, toeing off his own sodden loafers.

“This is the part where you remind me how Neal likes you better than me, right?” he asks, and then pulls his sweater up and off, leaving him in a white undershirt. “That he’d never request for the picture to be taken down and I don’t know how to do it myself?”

Mac tosses her boots away and strips off her socks, realizing this is her turn to pretend to consider the question at hand. “Yes, I think so.”

“I thought you wanted to audience to think of me as a smug East Coast intellectual, not a farm-bred hick,” he says with a smirk, matching her for her socks and then dropping to one knee, then the other before her on the couch and it takes everything in her not to make a crack about his poor ligaments and baseball injuries.

She smothers in the instinct by pursuing a different avenue of mockery, one more suited for the task at hand.

“I also may have told the staff that men should want to be you and women should want to fuck you. I also think the phrase _jawline of an American hero_ was also batted about,” she replies airily. “Audience engagement. It’s why I got you out of the pinstripes, back into Armani, and made you get a damn haircut.”

Spreading her legs so that he can position himself between them, she bites her lip.

“How altruistic of you,” he contends, voice dropping as he moves closer to her, and then closer again.

Somehow, her hands find themselves on his shoulders. And then start moving down his arms, which she has sorely missed being able to touch. Will leans even closer, until their faces are inches apart, until she can feel his breath on her cheek.

“Mmm… hardly. God though, your hands. And arms, in general. I’ve missed them. Bless Nebraska agriculture.” She digs her fingers into the side seams of his undershirt. “Take this off.”

“Hmm?” Once again, he looks thoroughly engrossed in her breasts.

She laughs. “Take off your clothes, they’re soaked through. I’ll throw them into the dryer.”

“Is this you being altruistic again?” His eyes flicker upwards, to her face, before a look of lust clouds his features and he buries his face in her neck and runs a trail of kisses down her collarbone and down her sternum. Making a happy sound, he runs his tongue along the lace fringing the cups of her bra.

“God, no. This is me wanting to get you naked,” she replies with a short giggle. “Not that I have any objections when you decide to go farmboy on me, but I do like the cashmere sweaters and wool coats. Hypothermia… not such a good look.”

“Will you be getting naked with me?” he asks, pulling the halves of her shirt apart in an apparent attempt to answer his own question. “You know, in the interest of parity.”

“If you take my clothes off, I won’t stop you. I mean, I’m not stopping you.”

She turns her head to give him better access to her neck. Outside the wide windows looking out towards Times Square, snow is coming down in thick white blankets that almost obscure the twinkling billboard lights down the block. Complete darkness must be imminent.

Next to her windows is her one monument to the season, the Christmas tree her mother bought.

Feeling what is either the holiday spirit or arousal, she reaches for the light switch above her head, turning on the more nearby twinkling lights pre-installed on the tree. It is, she concedes, fairly pretty. But her mother _has_ always had a good eye for these sorts of things.

“My bed’s in the same place it used to be,” she volunteers after Will finishes shucking her shirtsleeves off her arms and starts pushing her bra cups down below her breasts, leaning forward to pull a nipple into his mouth. “Washer and dryer are still in my walk-in. We could hear when the buzzer goes off, or not.”

Then, without any sort of ceremony, she pulls his t-shirt over his head and throws it aside, immediately reminded of the visual benefits of Will without clothes.

“What if we don’t make it to the bed?” he asks, countering by removing her bra and then relocating his hands to undo the fly of her jeans, his nimble fingers pulling down her zipper with a particular sort of slowness.

She squirms, heat rising between her thighs when his hands brush down the apex of her legs.

“Then our clothes won’t dry,” she says quietly, the words turning to liquid in her mouth as she tries to shake them off her tongue. “You won’t have anything to wear.”

“I have a feeling I’ll survive.” Tacitly, he asks her to lift her hips, and pulls down her pants and underwear in one go. “You’re a warm-blooded American woman.” And then removes them from around her ankles one foot at a time, and then lifting her legs up to rest atop his shoulders. “Do we need — not that I’m going to skip...” He gestures vaguely towards her folds, and she snorts, bringing a cringing forearm up to cover her eyes. “If you say no, but just, well, general housekeeping—”

“I’m on the pill,” she answers, face contorting into an expression of slight discomfort.

This is all so familiar, but the illusion of familiarity is an easily abrupted one. It has been _four years._ Mac just hopes that they’re not terrible at it. Sex, like many things, is something Mac suspects isn’t comparable to riding a bike and the other things that aphorisms claim you never forget.

She hasn’t _slept_ with anyone since Will, but that’s neither here nor there nor a conversation she wants to have at the moment, for similar but somewhat different reasons why she decided to not push on Will having apparently _read her fucking emails_ months ago.

The anxiety thrumming in her bloodstream just keeps pushing _later, later, later._

Outside, the wind is howling. She decides to focus on that instead — that and the feeling of Will’s tongue laving languid circles against the inside of her knee.

“Okay,” he answers simply once she decides to look at him again.

After that, he abandons any illusion of slowness. Hands cupping her ass, he pulls her to the edge of the couch, and bends to press a kiss to the top of her pubic bone. He’s watching her with a look in his eyes that looks mostly earnest.

And maybe a little bit nervous. “I’m not going to grade you after.”

She might be projecting, about that.

“What?”

(She is definitely projecting.)

“You look nervous.”

Will rolls his eyes. “I am definitely not that.”

Probably to prove his point, he rubs two fingers up and down her folds. Her hips jerk into his hand, not exactly anticipating such direct contact so immediately, remembering that Will usually tends to… _ease_ into things where oral sex is involved, take his time.

Barely turning his head to kiss the inside of her thigh, he watches his fingers slide through her wetness. Gentle, he swirls them around her opening, pushing one into her to the knuckle, and then the other, a slow smile taking over his face when she hums contentedly and pushes herself into his grasp.

God, it feels good.

Then he crooks his fingers inside her, and it feels _amazing._

He buries his face between her legs, mouth working her clit skillfully. _No,_ she thinks, _no reason to be nervous at all._ The sounds she hears herself make are soft, and high, gradually growing louder and louder the more insistent his tongue and lips and hands become. Eyes glazing over, her head lolls back against the couch cushions, the glowing lights on the Christmas tree become fuzzy blurs as Will ushers her towards climax.

“Oh god,” she moans, clenching her fingers into his hair.

He pauses, looking up at her over the plane of her body. She moans louder. Noisily, he sucks her clit between his lips until her muscles are pulled taut, her body leaping up into a line like a marionette on a string. “Oh, fuck — Billy!”

The pressure overwhelms her suddenly, and he coaxes her through her orgasm. Pulling his fingers from her but leaving his mouth, he eases her down from it, hands massaging her thighs and lips moving softly over her folds until the tremors and contractions cease.

“Okay,” she exhales shakily, “you haven’t forgotten a fucking thing.”

Will looks up from between her thighs, disheveled and slightly flushed but entirely pleased with himself. Grinning, he kisses her stomach before resting his chin on top of her knee.

“So how’d I do?”

She squints down at him. “Huh?”

“You said you were going to grade me after,” he teases, drawing invisible shapes on the backs of her calves.

Wrinkling her nose, she kicks at him softly. “I said I _wasn’t_ going to grade you after. And besides, champ, I don’t think we’re done yet. And your pants are still on.”

“They _needed_ to be on,” he argues with a pointed sort of gesture, pouting. But then stands, and starts undoing his belt and the rest of it and in a very short amount of time his jeans and boxers are on the floor and she’s biting her lip at a certain part of his anatomy. “Are we moving to the bed?”

“My legs feel like they’re not attached to me at the moment.”

He takes that as she means it, as a compliment, and joins her on the couch. Impatient, she tries to pull him down on top of her. But Will seems content to resume his attentions to her breasts, and licks a stripe from the bottom of one round to her nipple, tugging at the bud with his lips. Which Mac immediately counters by reaching between them for his erection and folding her hand around it, pumping until he inhales sharply, wraps his arms around her waist, and pulls her on top of him.

“Just relax,” he whispers in her ear.

She is tempted to point out that she can hardly _relax_ when she can feel the head of his cock pushing against her opening, but instead tries to follow his directions and lies bonelessly on his chest, lets her legs loosen and splay open to his sides.

Kissing her ear, he positions himself and then thrusts up slowly until they’re seated together. With a pleased moan, she rolls her hips and pushes herself up onto her elbows so that at least she can look him in the face.

It doesn’t last very long but the angle is exquisite and Will is doing all of the work. And panting his name on a high note, her fingers bite into his shoulders as he curls his own into her hips and ass, and with a stuttered, “Oh I love you,” tumbling from her lips she comes with a keening sort of cry.

Biting her lip, she struggles to keep herself from dropping her face into his shoulder, riding out the last of her climax and is wholly surprised when it continues to last and builds again into a second release, one that has her arching and clawing at his skin as pleasure explodes from her center.

Through her orgasm she hears him desperately groaning her name. When his hand yanks clumsily at her hair she looks at him, and he follows her over.

It’s not until they regain their breath that they realize that the power’s gone out.

“Oh,” Mac says breathlessly, laughing at them. “It’s dark. Fuck. I uh — I have candles.”

With a graceless attempt at standing, Will tries to wave her off. “I’ll light them. You stay—”

She continues laughing, wobbily getting to her feet. “No, I need to use the bathroom anyway. And you don’t know where the lighter is.”

“Kitchen, top drawer next to the refrigerator with the takeout menus,” he says, leaning back against the couch, folding his arms behind his head and lifting a cocky eyebrow. (“You know what, screw you,” she shoots back.) The couch unfolds into the reclining position. A look of surprise takes over his face, and is quickly supplanted by a look of contentment.

After she cleans herself up, its candles on the coffee table and the thick duvet from her bed and the two of them settling in for a nap as midtown settles into a windy, snowy darkness.

“So do I have a grade yet?” Will asks, curling around her.

Muttering, she squirms until she finds a comfortable position wedged between him and the couch, burrowing into his warm chest.

“God, you just don’t quit,” she yawns, brushing her lips against his throat. “Go to sleep.”

She does, anyway, satiation weighing down her limbs until she’s pulled into slumber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	4. No Place Like Home (For the Holidays)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** My apologies on the delay for the chapter. For so long I'd go to write it and then where I was taking it never really felt right. So about a week ago I realized I didn't really like the way I initially planned to end this fic, that it didn't feel like I was giving the narrative any real resolution. So I retooled it, so now instead of four parts there will be six. (As you can see reflected in the chapter stats above.) So anyway, thank you all for waiting. I hope you enjoy this chapter. :)

They’re not labelled — and why would they be? Mac knows who all of them are. He imagines that she doesn’t invite many people into her apartment, besides Jim. Who also knows who all of them are.

Will thinks he can guess at who some of them are. The dashing Marine Corps Captain Noah Mason, CO of the 7th Marines Electric Company is the easiest between the scar on his face and the chest of medals. Will thinks he has Frankie decided. And Gunnery Sergeant Andrew Cartwright, if only because his rank. But Johnno and Zack he can’t place and even though there are only two women on Mac’s shelf, he doesn’t know which portrait is of Tina and which is of Katherine.

And then the self below that, below the framed five by seven service portraits, is another shelf of pictures. Candids. Of her, and Jim, and a redhead he believes is her former production assistant Molly Thompson and a darker-haired man he assumes is video journalist Danny Anderson, and MacKenzie’s assorted collection of wayward Marines. Desert landscapes and dark bars with neon signs in German hanging in the background, and what he thinks are military bases with walls of corrugated steel. One that makes his heart stop — Mac lying in a hospital bed, skin beyond pale and actually grey, flanked by Jim and Molly and Danny. Probably riding a morphine high, but smiling into the camera.

Held by, if he’s remembering the emails right, a Katherine who at the time had been newly transferred from the 7th Marines to complete a surgical fellowship at Landstuhl.

And there are older ones, of her family. Ones that he’s seen before. None, it seems, from any time recently. But pictures of little MacKenzie — including one of her with all of her little sisters, and her older brother. Little happy Mackenzie.

In East Berlin.

(With pigtails.)

Then there are a few newer ones, populated by the staff, Don and Sloan. Mostly at Hang Chews, where he rarely puts in an appearance. Possibly because Mac usually does, so he feels like his own would be superfluous.

But now he’s wondering what he’s been missing.

He’s definitely missing from her _life,_ it seems.

Or at least from these shelves.

Somehow in the eight months that she has been in Manhattan, not a single picture has been taken of him and Mac together. And he knows that it is entirely his own fault, because Mac does not seem to have shied away from any cameras in the past four years. Smiling, even. Even if he can tell that in some of the oldest ones that she’s miserable.

And in some of the newer ones.

_Fuck._

“What are you doing?” He startles, turning around in time to see Mac’s head appearing out from under the duvet they’ve been using on the couch. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Are you gonna give me my sweater back?”

(The generator in Mac’s apartment building had kicked by the time they woke up from their first nap. So Mac put all their things into the dryer and then enticed him into the shower — not that he needed much enticing beyond removing her naked self to her bathroom — and by the time they were both washed and toweled off, their clothes less resembled melting icicles.

And never to let a closet full of her own clothes stop her, Mac immediately claimed his sweater, pulling it over her head to match with a pair of heather grey yoga pants.

Thus consigning him to his boxers and undershirt.)

Mac yawns. “I have an old sweatshirt of yours, if you want it. It has some bullet holes in it, but it held up just fine in the end if you discount the tattered cuffs on the sleeves.”

“Sweatshirt?”

He feels what is probably a surge of inappropriate delight at the idea of Mac carrying something of his into war.

“Columbia Law. I’m wearing it in one of the pictures on the middle shelf,” she says, her voice scraping up from her throat.

Then he becomes certain that his delight is indeed inappropriate — the picture in question does indeed feature Mac in a grey Columbia Law Alumni sweatshirt that he wrote off as lost at the launderer’s years ago. She looks pale, and withdrawn, her dark hair unevenly cut to her shoulders and her eyes stamped with purple rings of exhaustion. A shadow on her cheek could be either a bruise or a smudge of desert silt.

She’s sitting half on Jim’s lap and half on Captain Noah Mason’s with a dreary attempt at a smile on her lips.

“I think we also used it as a tourniquet, once,” she continues, sounding dazed and far away. And he startles, by turn, looking back at her. “Well, by _we_ I mean Katherine. It was on Georgie, I think. When he caught a bullet in his calf. His tibia went through the skin. She thought she’d have to amputate his foot. Not that it… mattered. He also caught a bullet hole in his thigh and it sliced open his femoral artery when they were transporting him to medevac. But you… know that. From my emails.”

Lance Corporal George Szwarc, KIA in the Sangin Valley in 2008. Shot and killed during a Taliban summer offensive on the banks of the Helmand River. Will can’t wholly remember what Mac wrote about it — perhaps just that, the dispassionate details of a war death. He remembers that Georgie was from New Jersey, though. And he remembers Mac mentioning that she and Jim were planning to visit a friend’s grave over Memorial Day weekend.

His mind tracks back to something else that Mac said.

“Bullet holes?”

Sighing, she pushes herself up onto her elbows, and then sits up fully.

“It saw us through some close calls,” she says, combing a hand through her hair, and then shrugs. Her cheeks color faintly. “I slept with it under my pillow for like eighteen months. They had the nerve to call it my blankie. I think I had _just_ enough dignity to _not_ tell you that in all of my ramblings.”

Something warm burns in his chest, a heavy mixture of shame and desire and affection — and a newfound understanding of Jim Harper’s deep dislike of him.

“Do you still sleep with it?” he asks, meaning to be teasing but missing the mark, his inquiry sounding instead much more pointed. Cursing himself, he returns his gaze to the line of service portraits.

“That would just be creepy.” Mac smiles, albeit weakly. “What are you looking for?”

He realizes he’s been staring rather _intently_ at the portraits. Or rather, just staring intently, his thoughts taking a self-indulgent detour to the image of Mac in a tent in the desert, clutching at a sweatshirt he’s sure she took without permission (needed, or granted) in a time of their lives when they were both much, much happier.

 _Stop,_ he thinks, clearing his throat.

“Which one is Katherine?” he asks, deciding instead to change the subject.

“Far left.”

Dark hair, dark eyes, tan skin, and a hard sarcastic glint to her expression. The sort of person he would expect to have steady hands and a large dose of stoicism.

“I think I’ve got them figured out.” He glances at her, making sure that she’s watching, before pointing to each picture in turn. “So that’s Noah. Katherine. Tina. Frankie. And Johnno?”

Mac nods, dropping back down onto her elbows. “Yeah.”

“You know, you never actually physically described Zack.” He remembers that very clearly from her emails — he was looking for those details, when he read them. But Mac describes people’s natures, rather than their appearances. “Although the smile here is pretty cocky, so I assumed this was him.”

_Full of himself, but it’s half a front. Really quite sweet, even if he’s often loathe to show it. But when he does, it all comes from his eyes. Those eyes alone could light up the room, when he’s happy enough._

His heart plunked into his stomach when he read that the poor boy died.

“Yeah,” Mac whispers.

“I knew he was young. But I just didn’t realize…” His voice trails off; there are too many ways to finish the sentence, so he lets it hang. _He forgets to not surrender to the innocent farm boy routine at times._ Swallowing hard, he forces himself to look at her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. That I read your emails.”

A pall casts over MacKenzie’s face. Settling back into the soft suede of her couch cushions, she brings the duvet up protectively to her chin, her fingers curling around the edge.  

“Why _didn’t_ you tell me?”

Will stammers, trying to avoid just recounting the night that he finally _did_ read them after her first panicked middle-of-the-night phone call from her, after a nightmare. A phone call meant for Jim, of course. _I’m sorry, if you’re sleeping, I just can’t — I need to — do you remember at Salerno, did the suicide bombers—_

_MacKenzie?_

_Oh. Fuck. I’m sorry, you’re not Jim, I’m sorry, go back to sleep—_

_No, don’t hang up. I’m up._

It would be an explanation, but not the right one. But she had mentioned Salerno and then couldn’t elaborate. So when she hung up, he had gone looking through his inbox for explication.

“I guess I was terrified of what it would mean,” he says, leaving the bookshelf. Not wanting to bother her down feather fortress, he eases himself to lie next to her, atop the duvet. Then slowly, pries the words from his mouth. “Which is a shitty excuse. Because I read all your emails and even before that I knew how much you went through over there, and I still didn’t say anything.”

“You were still there,” she murmurs, rubbing a hand over her eyes.

Gently, he wraps his fingers around hers, revealing her face to him again. “I could have done better.”

“You’ve answered a lot of middle of the night phone calls,” she says firmly.

“That you meant for Jim,” he answers, just as firmly. “I should have told you. Because I love you and that’s what I was supposed to do.”

Just like she told him she was at Northwestern.

“You’re here now.” Blinking up at him, she licks her lips. “You were at work earlier. You’re not in Nebraska — why _aren’t_ you in Nebraska?”

Outside, the blizzard continues to blow. It is truly dark now, the hour past when the sun would have sunk low past the horizon on a clear day. After they showered and got dressed, Mac switched on the lights on her Christmas tree and lit a solid collective of candles, the mix of icicle lights and flame casting her living room in a yellow glow. So as they were still drowsy from exertion and newfound warmth, they crawled back under the blanket, turned on the local news, and fell back asleep to the sound of the weather forecast and the weather itself.

He traces the pads of his fingertips over her knuckles, rough callouses over soft skin. Then he turns her hand over, finding the lines on her palm. Noticing her watching him, he smiles, and brings her palm to his lips, kissing it softly.

“I didn’t want to be out of state if Jim was too,” he admits quietly. “I worry about you. I probably should have been more worried about you a year ago, I should have heard that you were stabbed and that you were having such a rough time and I didn’t — I ignored you, and you — so I think I’m trying to make up for that now. Because I love you. And I want to do better… than I have been doing.”

Mac shudders, laughing. “God. You must think I’m pathetic.”

“In fact, I think the opposite of that.” He rolls onto his side, fencing her head in with the squared angle of his bicep and forearm. “You’re the strongest, most tenacious person I know. That I know _of,_ even.”

“ _I_ think I’m pathetic,” she amends, muttering.  

_Oh honey._

But he knows the pathologies of PTSD just as well as she does.

His fingers drift through her hair, brushing her bangs back from her forehead again and again. It’s needless after the first pass through, but he likes the tactile repetition of it. “How long have you thought that?”

For a long moment, she’s silent.

“Do you remember when I came home from the two and a half weeks I spent in New Orleans as a field producer covering Katrina?” she finally asks, looking up at him with bright eyes.

Of course he remembers. CNN had asked Mac to go to New Orleans to cover the storm before anyone knew the colossus it would be. And then fucked her over repeatedly once they _did_ realize that they’d thrown one of their senior field producers into the hurricane of the century, leaving her with no room to cope with the immense loss and loss of life.

When she returned, he was struck by the mania in her eyes, how scattered her thoughts had become, her apartment, her appearance. He recognized that, when she walked into the newsroom eight months ago.

It just took him six hours to work up the wherewithal to call her on it.

“Yeah?”

“It was supposed to be our fifth date in a little over three months, and you had barely even kissed me,” she says, voice barely a whisper. “I got back on a Thursday and was out of the city all day Friday, and you asked if I wanted to go out for dinner on Saturday. But when you showed up at my apartment to pick me up—”

“You looked like you brought the hurricane home with you into your living room,” he teases, managing to keep his tone light this time.

A tiny grin dashes itself across her lips for half a second.

“I hadn’t quite mustered the energy to unpack,” she explains. “Or shower. Or brush my hair, really.” Her nose scrunches up. “So you cancelled our reservations and after realizing there was absolutely nothing edible left in my apartment, ordered pizza. Over my protests that all I needed was a fresh face of make-up and to put on a clean dress.”

“Honey, I think you really overestimate the power of a clean dress.” Thoughtfully, he leans down to kiss the tip of her nose. “That was the night we first slept together.”

He remembers it well — feeling like there was no need to leave the couch, and without much forethought at all he had landed his mouth on hers. Her hands clenched into the front of his shirt and she pulled him on top of her, pushing her tongue into his mouth and wrapping her legs around his hips. And kept going on feelings, until he slid down onto the floor and she helped him pull her pants down her thighs, and he tasted her for the first time.

One of Mac’s hands appears from under the duvet; she places it on his chest, her thumb stroking in circles. “You waited until the _fifth date_ to make a move.”

Gaping, he tries to assemble a response. “I—I didn’t want you think I was using you. For, you know.”

He _carried_ her to bed, that first time.

Exhaling softly, Mac rolls her eyes. Then, swallows hard, her eyes focusing beyond his face someplace over his shoulder. “For about... seven or eight months at that point, my _entire_ relationship with Brian had been him getting drunk, calling me until he could make me hate myself enough that I would come over, and _fucking_ me until I couldn’t walk straight even though I told him I didn’t like it. And I kept going. Because I thought at some point I could get the upper hand, or I don’t know, but...”

Her voice trails off. His _years_ of anger at Brian Brenner, on the other hand…

How did he miss that it was like _this?_ That Brian was more than a garden variety douchebag to her. Did he truly blind himself to Mac’s pain _this much?_ For his own sake?

“I thought that’s all I was good for,” Mac continues, the muscles in her cheek twitching slightly in a poor attempt to conceal her pain. “And then you came along and it was our third date and you wouldn’t even kiss me with tongue. I thought you weren’t really that into me. Until that night, after I came home from Hurricane Katrina.”

Heart pounding in his chest, he tries to keep his expression placid.

“That wasn’t in any of your emails.”

Heaving an uneven sigh, she smooths out what he sure are nonexistent wrinkles in his undershirt before momentarily meeting his gaze.

“I didn’t like the way it sounded,” she explains quietly, a self-deprecating smile perking up the corners of her mouth, “I broke it off with Brian a few weeks after that. I mean, I didn’t talk to him until a few weeks after that, and it was to tell him it was over. Because I fell in love with you. Because I realized that I _had_ fallen in love with you, and probably before our fifth date.”

A small laugh bursts from between her lips, her eyes brim with tears. She makes to wipe them away herself, but he does it for her, the tip of his index finger charting a course around the orbit of her eye, to her temple, and then her hairline.

“Probably when I was waist-deep in flood water and all I could think about was calling you, because I was finding bodies in houses with the Coast Guard and my production assistants were as green as grass and I knew you’d listen,” she continues, and then bites her lip. “And I _wanted_ you to listen, about all the news that wasn’t fit for air. And I knew you’d listen without turning the decision to go back around on me.” The implication of her last statement is detestable (but he can imagine it — Mac taking a call from Brian from a flooded-out hotel and finding only scorn for her troubles) and not for the first time Will wishes he could wrap his hands around Brian’s throat and _squeeze._ But he supposes that would only distress MacKenzie further rather than bring either of them any satisfaction. “I remember I was so _angry_ at myself. I was in love with you, but Brian had — being with him had made me think I wasn’t good for anything but a quick drunk screw and that anyone else was just being polite,” she finishes, voice strained. “I know that’s a long way from _he rejected me and I was hung up on him, that’s normal._ But I see a psychiatrist every week so…”

“Will you marry me?” he asks, without any sort of forethought and subsequently, without any sort of regret.

Mac blinks up at him. “What?”

“I swear I’m not just being polite,” he says. “You said earlier, it’s been six years. It’s not fast by anyone’s metric. And _by the way,_ you’re still not pathetic.” That felt important. So he said it. He wonders if he should say it again. “You’re smarter than me by a half mile, have reported more news in your career than anyone else I know _except Charlie_ , and can I also mention that you are the only person capable of producing _News Night_ as it is now? Because without you, I’m back to kitten cams and Jack Bauer in the A block — because without you I have no idea how to do any of this and not be so fucking out of my mind that I need everyone to love me.”

Will realizes that he’s rambling, but God help him if he has a fucking clue on how to stop himself. And poor MacKenzie, of course, is just staring at him. He forces himself to stop, rearrange his brain into something at least _resembling_ coherence, and start again.

“I just need _you,_ ” he says, recognizing desperation in his voice but unable to care. “And I’m in love with _you._ I’m gonna be in love with you for the rest of my life. So will you marry me?”

“Wait—”

But of course he’s ambushing her with this, when they’ve still got _days_ probably, of being stranded in her apartment and some sort of klaxon starts ringing in his head about 1L contract law and coercion. “I mean, if you say no I’m not gonna hold it against—”

“Yes.”

“What?”

His thoughts come to a complete halt. She can’t possibly have…

“Yes. I’m saying yes,” she says, eyes wide and insistent.

“You’re saying yes?”

Giggling, she smiles so widely that the corners of her eyes crinkle. “Yes.”

Sitting up, he pats around for he doesn’t know what, until he realizes what is missing. “Okay… now I see the importance of the ring, because I don’t have one and now I don’t have anything to do to—”

“Just _kiss_ me,” Mac says, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck.

So he does.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	5. It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thanks to everyone who's waited so patiently for this chapter. My apologies for making the chapter title a horrid pun. But alas, I am weak.

Will was insistent on moving the candles to her bedroom, rather than turning on the dim lamp on her nightstand. She wonders how she looks in candlelight, sitting astride him without a stitch of clothing on.

It appears he’s noticed her scar.

Or rather, decided to _make_ notice of it.

This second time is much slower than the first. The hour draws later, approaching the start of what would have been their nightly broadcast if not for the two feet of snow on the ground, thirty-five mile per hour winds, and the lack of a functioning generator at the AWM building in Midtown Manhattan. There’s nowhere to be. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do, but hold his hands onto her waist and keep doing _this._

His thumb sketches a soft calloused touch over the puckered flesh that remains from the stabbing.

It’s a nasty-looking thing, jagged and uneven, the muscle underneath intractable and firm. The only remnant of sensation at the entry site is a dull pulling at her abdomen with pressure; his thumb skates up to where the long blade was pulled _out_ at a messy angle, and she shivers as he sets her frazzled nerves alight.

No one touches her there. Her own fingers avoid the wound, for forgetting’s sake.

The only real change has been in her wardrobe, the residual soreness necessitating high-waisted skirts and loose blouses and when the weather is particularly disagreeable, lower heels. But no, she never touches it. Not since the stitches came out.

“Sorry, is that — should I stop?”

His hand freezes, and he looks up at her with a bare expression.

“It feels weird,” she concedes, shifting atop him. “It’s a little distracting.”

Which is saying quite a bit, considering that he’s inside her. Flexing her hips, she settles further onto his erection. He pulses in response, his body rocking up into hers by instinct.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, cinching his hands at her waist, stilling her.

“Not as such, no,” she answers, suddenly breathless. “I just uh — I have adhesions. There. I can feel them moving, when you do that. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just… strange.”

This seems like the sort of conversation that they should have with the lights on, but here they are in a candlelight glow, in the midst of a round between the sheets. Leaning down a bit, she brushes a flop of hair off his forehead. Oddly aware of her body now, she tries to rid herself of the hollow sensation of live skin moving over dullen muscle that keeps echoing through her jangled nerves. After all, he has to live with this now just as much as she does.

He just keeps looking up at her, guilt etched into his features.

“Sorry.”

“It really doesn’t hurt,” she says, taking his hand off her waist, placing his fingertips firmly on top of her scar. “Here.”

Will contemplates her for a moment, pulling his hand away before deciding to replace it with just his index finger, tracing the length of hard pink skin with a very deliberate lightness. “Does it ever hurt?”

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

His eyes flicker from her middle to her face. “When?”

A dozen lines of thought collide, and she can feel her face screwing up into a grimace. “When it gets bitterly cold. Or sometimes I’ll move wrong, stretch too far. I tried yoga when I first got my diagnosis and wound up curled into a ball on the floor and had to crawl to my gym bag for Vicodin.” That was a particularly proud moment down on the mats of a DC gym, and was the approximate moment she wrote off healthy coping mechanisms for a bowling alley that would serve her liquor at ten in the morning. Still, she tries to smile. Will just looks vaguely sick. “My doctor said if I get sick they might get inflamed, depending. And when I put pressure on it, for too long. I can’t wear most mid-rise pants anymore. Oh, and when I throw up. But since I cut down on the drinking that hasn’t been an issue.”

One corner of her mouth cooperates enough to form into a misshapen grin. Shrugging, she places her palms on his chest, fingers fanning over blonde wiry curls.

“I’m amazed you’re still standing,” he says, his fingers tripping up her ribcage and molding around her breasts. With just the right amount of pressure he pushes them up and together, turning his hands out to roll her nipples between his forefingers and thumbs. “I mean, really. You’re magnificent.”

Jaw dropping, she focuses intently on her nails and Will’s heart thudding against her palm. “Well, you’re at least half the reason I’m still standing.”

“You got through twenty-six months of being an embed by yourself.”

She’s thirty seconds away from telling him they’re either going to have this conversation or stop attempting to have sex, because she can barely focus. “Not by myself.”

“With Jim,” he amends, hands slowing once more. “But still. That was you. You got yourself through it.”

“Yeah, well. It’s what came after that’s fucked me over,” she concedes, sliding her palms up to the roping muscles of his shoulders. “I was fine. Or maybe _fine_ is too strong a word, but I was doing really well with avoidance and denial for a good run, until a six inch blade made me stop.”

Exhaling slowly, she closes her eyes and grimaces. The firefights, singed corpses and dead friends, the traumatized civilians and the distinct lack of Will answering _any_ of her emails or phone calls, and all of her fuck ups. She put it all behind her as it came, filtering emotion like water through a sieve. But the tidewaters came rushing back, and then she drowned. Since then, she has existed in the last gasping breath before the asphyxiation high.

Until today.

Will pulls her down to lie on his chest. With languid limbs, she curls her arms around his neck, tucks her knees in against his waist.

“You can’t really keep running from yourself when you’ve got a morphine drip and God knows how many monitors chaining you to a hospital bed. Did a lot of thinking,” she continues, muffling her voice against his shoulder. “Thinking that I’d put off for two and a half years.”

“Yeah, I know how that goes,” he says quietly, and then says nothing else.

Tucking her head under his chin, she looks out her wide bedroom windows. Through thick curtains of snow, she can barely make out the lit-up billboards in Times Square shining out into the wintry night.

 _Happy Holidays from ABCNews!_ flashes in hues of gold and white, before changing to twenty-foot high weather bulletin.

A hundred questions about John burn in her mind, but as always, she lets them smolder and obliterate themselves. Will rarely volunteers anything about his father and his father’s particular brand of cruelty, and it would do no good to try to pry any of his secrets from him. Not when it would only satiate her own selfish curiosity and upset him by turn.

She keeps talking, though. All through the past eight months.

But she supposes Will is much more settled in his suffering than she is; she is still learning how to coexist with her own.

“When did they send you home?” he asks, stroking her back.

“As soon as I was cleared to fly.” She’s told him about this part but she doesn’t mind telling him again, not really. Her emails stopped with the stabbing, and while some of it she confessed her first day at ACN, the vast majority has remained unclarified to him — to his credit, Will hasn’t asked her many questions, taking what she’s chosen to divulge as it’s come. “Under the pretense that we’d go back out after a few weeks in DC, but… I did the twelve mandated sessions, and I failed the psych evaluation on both the CNN and Pentagon sides.”

“And then that’s when Charlie found you?”

“And then CNN released me from my contract, and I started drinking heavily.” His fingers thread through her hair; sighing, she kisses his shoulder. “It was about two months after _that_ , that Charlie found me. I was pretty lucky he found me on a warm day, since otherwise I’d have worn your sweatshirt to the bowling alley. Then I really would _not_ have had any ground, negotiation-wise.”

Will’s response is a dry little laugh. “Did you have any ground to begin with?”

_You're not offering me the job in spite of my history with Will, you're offering it to me because of it._

“No.” She snorts, wriggling her hips up until he slips out of her. The moment, it seems has passed or at least been delayed — but they have days before they have to be anywhere. “Charlie gave me no quarter. He was… he very _gently_ gave me no quarter.”

_I'm offering it to you because you're my best hope of turning our flagship news hour into something we're proud of._

And really, if it had been five degrees cooler that March day…

_He hasn't returned any of my calls or emails or letters in years. I don't think he's that interested in what I think of him._

_That may be the only thing he's interested in._

Biting her lip, she furrows her brows together.

Then slides off of him, her wobbly legs landing on the floor. Hissing at the cold, she snags the throw off the end of her bed and wraps it around her shoulders, her bare feet padding against the rug as she walks into her closet — trying to ignore the wetness still between her thighs.

“Where are you going?” he calls after her.

Her memory is unerring in this respect; the Columbia sweatshirt is in the box she remembers burying it in when she packed up her sublet in DC to return to Manhattan. Trembling, she unfolds it, holding it in front of her. It’s as dingy and sad as she feared.

She returns to the bedroom, climbing back into bed and dropping it in Will’s lap.

His eyes go wide.

“You were… not kidding about bullet holes.”

“You know, I don’t even remember packing it?” she mutters, playing with the threads at the end of a fraying sleeve. “Both times. When I fled Manhattan for Atlanta and then when we left for Ramstein, to meet up with the 7th Marines before Electric Company’s initial deployment to Baghdad.”

“I sort of wondered what happened to it.” Under the duvet, his hand finds her thigh and squeezes. “I knew you had stolen it, but…”

Spreading it out over the blankets, he studies the faded heather grey sweatshirt. Ripped in some places, stained tan and brown in others, every seam frayed and split. She used to be able to sit in the rec room or around the fire at night and pull the cuffs down to cover her hands, the hem at the bottom to the tops of her thighs, or the whole thing over her knees. It was soft in a place that was hard, and warm in a place that could get so, so cold.

Home was something fragile that she carried with her, and when she lost it over and again, she could bury her head in it and pretend a tent was New York City until dawn came.

“It’s seen some action,” she says, picking a piece of lint off the neck. “Jim even brought it to the hospital for me. I missed you.”

She tries to say it simply, as if _I missed you_ wasn’t a yawning, cavernous hole in her chest for almost three years.

“I should have heard,” Will says after a short silence, his voice strained. “I should have — I know people, who would have known. And I should have paid closer attention. Or any attention. I should have heard, and I should have gone. So that when you were chained to the hospital bed, you weren’t so… I should have been there. It shouldn’t have gotten so bad. It wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t surgically excised you from my life. You wouldn’t have been stuck trying to cling to — after it had been used as a tourniquet?”

Somehow she laughs. Then hides her mouth behind her hand, sheepish at the guilt weighing on him. “You’re here now.”

Face painfully earnest, he holds her gaze.

“And I’m still sorry.”

She falters.

“So am I,” she finally says, and then swallows down a painful lump in her throat. Shrugging, she tries to wipe any hint of distress from her face, knowing instead she probably just looks manic. “It was just… it was more than two and a half weeks covering Katrina. And you forgave me… eight months ago, when you really had no good reason to except for the fact that I was having a nervous breakdown on your shoulder. ”

He leans his shoulder into hers. “I think the nervous breakdown was a pretty compelling reason.”

“You’re just soft,” Mac murmurs, a smile breaking over her lips.

“How dare you.”

“In the head, maybe,” she continues blandly in her usual brand of droll mockery. Nodding, she leans her temple against his arm, and sighs. “I forgive you. If you feel like you need forgiveness.”

Turning his head, he buries the bottom half of his face in her hair.

“Why?” he asks, his voice a ragged exhale.

“I don’t wanna hurt any more than I have to.” Which might be her therapist’s point. “And I don’t want you to hurt any more than you have to.”

“I never should have made you leave,” he says. “I never should have left, either.”

At this point, she really can’t remember who left first. Confessing about her liaisons with Brian had been the cause of the initial collapse, of course — but the weeks following are still such a blur that she cannot remember if she sought to embed before he let himself be headhunted by ACN or after. If she tacitly returned her key to his apartment before he threw his copy of hers onto her desk, or vice versa. If he fired her as his EP, or if she resigned. Or if possibly, maybe, it was all one long series of assumptions and mistakes after her first devastating revelation.

Then she wonders if the truth matters at all, if their perceptions cannot possibly align with it.

“We fucked everything up,” she murmurs in agreement.

Will ignores her in favor of balling the sweatshirt up in his hands. “You should burn this.”

“Probably.” Gently, she takes the sweatshirt from him, twining her middle finger through one of the bullet holes and twisting the fabric around the knuckle — there is no fucking way anything is happening to this sweatshirt.

Uncomfortable, she turns a heavy stone of a thought over in her mind.

“You’re not… you’re not what your father says you are,” she says, feeling unsteady. Beside her, he blinks rapidly at her hand. “You know that, right? You deserve to be happy. To be forgiven. To be loved. I love you — I’ll always love you. I have the stupid ruined sweatshirt to prove it.”

Petulant — or making a show of being petulant — he prods the sweatshirt before reclaiming it.

“This is the last thing I gave you.”

Then he throws it over the side of the bed and onto the floor.

“No, the very extravagant watch was the last thing you gave me, you idiot,” Mac says, rolling her eyes. It only cost him thousands of dollars, hardly even a blip on his credit card statement she’s sure. “And next you’ll give me a ring.”

Giving him an unceremonious shove, she pushes him down onto the pillows.

Without missing a moment, Will wraps his arms around her waist and rolls her onto her back. With a small shriek of surprise she opens her legs to let him settle between them.

And like at multiple other moments today, MacKenzie decides to not question the shift in conversation.

After all, that first one under the mistletoe turned out exceedingly well.  

Will nips at her lower lip, and then soothes it with his tongue. “If there wasn’t a blizzard outside I’d have already gone to Tiffany and back and gotten a big fat one for your finger.”

“There’s no shot in this being subtle, is there?” she asks, nearly flippant. Still, she looks at her left hand, considering what her finger might look like next week before deciding that _that_ line of thought might be better post-coital — his cock pulsing against her stomach is a compelling enough argument in that regard.

Wrapping her legs around his hips and digging her heels into his hamstrings, she pushes his pelvis snug into hers.

“God no.” His touch is hot, and firm, and everywhere from her calves to her thighs and her breasts before he grips her wrists and pins them to the sides of her head. “Everyone with a twenty foot radius of you is going to be able to see it. It’ll pick up UV rays from space. So big that it’ll reflect fluorescent light so brightly you could use it as a weapon to blind people—”

“One request,” she interrupts.

“—it needs to be large enough that it has its own gravity.”

Or tries to.

Will, of course, is off on his own little planet.

His body securing her firmly against the mattress, she squirms. Then lifts a single brow at him and fixes him with a stare that is only a little dampened by the fact that his face slightly blurry at such close range.

“Yes?” he asks, smirking.

“I’m going to need to be able to _lift my hand_.”

To prove a point, she breaks out of his grip. Then reaches down to grasp at some of her more favored parts of his anatomy.

“Is that really that important to you?” he teases, and then licks a stripe from her shoulder to her ear.

“Shut up.”

God, he’s heavy, but it all the best ways. Writhing, she places his erection against her folds, sliding the head up him up and down her wetness. _Incorrigible._ She rubs him over her clit, satisfying herself until he whines. And then groans as he braces himself on his elbows, bracketing her head with his forearms.

His voice breaks over a small-but-entirely-audible tremor—

“Okay, okay, you can pick it out.”

With a contented little noise, she lets him push inside her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	6. Tidings of Comfort and Joy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you to everyone who has read, left kudos, and especially everyone who has left comments. I hope you enjoyed reading this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it. I'm not sure if I'll continue to dabble in this little AU that I've grown quite fond of, but regardless, it's been a good time. (And in case anyone is wondering, Genoa does not happen in this AU. Since Mac has significantly less time for Jerry's bullshit here since she is spending significantly more time with Will. In fact, Jim might not even go on the campaign trail at all... should things continue...) Thank you all again!

When he left CNN in 2007 he was ten months into a contract that put his salary at just under a million dollars a year, before bonuses. He left a ten o’clock weekday slot because it was what he did with Mac, and Mac was gone. When he went to Charlie to see if there was anything at ACN for him he hadn’t expected to be offered eight o’clock and nine million dollars a year, plus other incentives and appearance fees.

The first thing he did was buy a new apartment, and then he paid for his oldest niece to go to Harvard Law. Then he had Scott hire him a driver, and buy him a car.

Then he bought anything else that came to mind.

Will has an idea of what Mac makes as his executive producer, and what she made in the past three years as an embedded journalist. Which is to say that she lives comfortably, now. She just can’t throw ten thousand dollars at an evening gown, on a whim.

Which means that sort of thing is _his_ job.

Will doesn’t know what silk taffeta — or any fabric that isn’t cotton or flannel or fleece — is, as a general rule. But the gown that Mac currently has on is a deep burgundy color, slim cut through her hips, and is made of silk taffeta. He liked it immediately when she tried it on in the store — liked the wide v-cut neckline and low back, liked the way the fabric shimmered as she turned to appraise herself in the full-length mirror, liked the way the straps threatened to fall off her shoulders and the way his fingers itched to brush them down onto her arms.

He likes it now, in the back of the limousine that’s theirs for tonight as it creeps downtown through near-standstill traffic after leaving Gracie Mansion and Bloomberg’s New Year’s Eve party.

“You’re thinking,” she says, her voice champagne-light and playfully accusatory.

Her head falls into the juncture of his shoulder and his neck, her left hand sliding up so she can straighten his bow tie. Capturing her hand, he brushes his lips against her knuckles, then examines her still empty ring finger.

“I am thinking,” he confirms, and then smirks, rebuking her next remark before she can actually say it. “And I’ll remind you that the last time I decided to think the results turned out pretty well for the both of us.”

“You were thinking when you kissed me under the mistletoe?”

Her lips quirking into a mischievous grin, her eyelids flutter in what is probably intended to represent a lack of guile. Instead, he’s just struck by the way her long dark lashes fit against her high cheekbones; some of her make-up has already been sweated off at the Mayor’s party, leaving her skin glittering and flushed and her eyes ringed by smudged black liner.

She’s breathtaking.

“That… may have been more about instinct,” he stammers after a moment, staring down at her wide open expression. “But after. The thinking came after.”

She hums in agreement. “And they were all good thoughts.”

They were also thoughts that required _talking_ , which is why they didn’t sleep until they looked outside and saw sunlight. Which was surprising for two reasons, the first of which being that they had managed to stay awake the whole night. The second being that they hadn’t — until the light of a grey winter dawn was filtering through MacKenzie’s bedroom windows — realized it had fucking _finally_ stopped snowing.

He put on enough clothes to suffice grabbing breakfast from the bakery two storefronts down from Mac’s apartment building, and by the time he returned it was, naturally, snowing once more.

So they ate croissants naked, under the covers, and he licked a dribble of butter off her breasts.

The next time they resurfaced — yesterday, Will is not too proud to admit — was to buy a dress for tonight’s festivities.

“Thank you,” he says.

A reminiscent smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

Mac reclaims her hand, tracing his lower lip with her index finger. “So what are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking…” he begins, eyes visiting the closed partition separating them from the driver, “that if we walk into the ACN party together like this, several people will have questions to ask. And if we announce that we’re getting married to a room full of people, and there isn’t a ring on your finger, many of those people will probably harass me for it.”

She snorts. “You can say Charlie.”

“I was more worried about Sloan. And then Maggie… and Charlie,” he concedes, and then runs a secondary mental evaluation of ACN staff, feeling like he’s forgotten someone obvious. “And Jim?”

Sir Edward and Lady McHale have at least always _liked_ him. That phone call — while nerve wracking in its own right — and the subsequent announcement went down easily for the McHales, who Will suspects were just relieved that their Mackie wasn’t wasting away in a Spartan midtown apartment for the holidays.

(Or, he reminds himself of her formerly-dire mental health, the rest of her life.)

But he suspects that Jim is going to be less enthusiastic about the sudden turnaround in his and Mac’s relationship.

Mac smirks, then bites her lip, peering up at him. “Jim doesn’t know a diamond set in platinum from a ring pop.”

Leaning in close on the wide limousine seat, she edges herself half into his lap, pushing her breasts against his arm. Outside, the city slides by with a certain kind of cold slowness; the whole of Manhattan is outside tonight.

“You just wanna show off,” she teases him.

“Yeah, that too.” He brushes the backs of his fingers over the swell of her breasts and then slides his hand further down, gripping her thigh through the folds of her dress. His pulse leaps; his thumb rubs against the juncture where hip meets leg. Squirming in response, Mac leans her face close to his, and he nips at her mouth before kissing her properly. “That’s why I had Scott arrange something.”

She narrows her eyes. “What did you do?”

Shifting in his seat, Will extracts a Tiffany and Co. business card from his jacket. On the back of the thick card is, in a woman’s nondescript handwriting: _Private after-hours showing: 12/31, 9:30 PM_ , along with a set of initials.

“It was right on the way to AWM, so I thought, why not?”

It seemed like the thing to do — new year, new start. It’s the sort of thing that should be marked by something large and ostentatious, and that’s besides the fact that he was going to buy her the ring anyway.

(Almost as an afterthought, he checks his watch — they’re right on time.

For once.)

He hands her the card.

“You’re hopeless.”

“And _you_ have thirty minutes to pick a ring.”

Mac slips the card back into the pocket from whence it came. “Oh honey, if you think I’ll need that long—”

“It took you three hours at the four different stores to pick a dress to wear tonight,” he scoffs, pulling her legs into his lap.

Her finger makes its way into his face.

“That’s different,” she contends.

“How?” he splutters. Because seriously — they are hardly on the same level of commitment, unless one counts the pictures taken tonight. Which he does not. Mac has _years_ of being photographed on his arm to come, one evening gown in the pages of _Star_ or _In Touch Weekly_ isn’t going to remembered by anyone, except him. “You’re wearing the dress for a few hours, and the ring for the rest of your life, but the _ring_ is the one that won’t take you—”

“I don’t need to worry about how the ring fits over my ass,” she replies, examining the soon-to-be-occupied finger on her left hand.

Will feels his eyebrows lift towards his hairline.

“Your ass looks magnificent, by the way. So do your legs. And your breasts.” Hands cinching in at her waist, he charts the underwire of her bra with his thumbs. For later, of course. So that he doesn’t have to worry about figuring out what undergarments she’s wearing in the actual moment; he searches out the clasp in the back through the bodice of her dress with his fingertips, tracing it with a large degree of anticipation. “Face-wise, you’re also looking great tonight. And your hair is doing the flippy thing at the bottom — I’ve always wondered how you achieve that.”

He’s loathe to remove his hands from her waist, so instead he ducks his head to lick a stripe up the side of her neck. Her hair falls in curtains around his face, dark locks smelling like hairspray and her perfume.

“You watched me do my hair,” she murmurs, tipping her head back and gripping his shoulders.

 _My focus was drawn elsewhere_ , he thinks, but doesn’t get any further than remembering Mac standing in her bathroom in black lace panties, thigh high stockings, and strapless bra, moving the hot iron rhythmically through her hair as he sat on the bed in his pants and tuxedo shirt, waiting for her to finish so she could tie his bowtie.

And so that he could zip her into her gown, like a personal promise that he would be the one drawing the zipper back down in a few hours’ time.

On his lap, her legs shift restlessly. His own are obscured by yards of dark silk taffeta that shines both red and gold in the dim yellow lights in the Lincoln town car. Catching the hem of her dress, his hand glides up her calf to the inside of her knee, and then even further.

Then suddenly, the car stops.

“Yeah but I wasn’t watching your _hair…_ ” he says, his lips at her ear. Through the pedestrians on the sidewalk, he sees the facade of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store. “Come on.”

Not waiting for the driver, he shrugs on his jacket and moves to get out of the car.

Mac grabs his arm, pulling him back. “Wait.”

He stares at her, puzzled; mind filling with all sorts of _helpful_ thoughts such as any and all possible objections Mac might have to sealing their engagement, his expression then turns panicked. Limbs locking up, his heart jumps and leaps between his lungs.

“What?”

“ _Someone_ is going to take a picture,” she mutters, gaze on his jaw as she yanks his face under the light. “You have lipstick on your chin, I mean. I have no idea how _that_ could have happened.”

In the time it takes her to find a napkin in her absurdly small purse and wipe whatever makeup she’s left on his face, his heart has barely recuperated. Still, he manages to place a smile on his face. Then he feels it grow — this is MacKenzie, and she’s going to marry him. She’s given him everything, and now he wants to give her the world.

The driver opens the door for them.

Lightly, he presses his lips to her cheek. Then he bundles her black rabbit fur wrap around her shoulders, takes her hand, and helps her out of the limousine. Stepping out onto the sidewalk, she smoothes her hands down the folds and pleats of her dress, the fabric making a soft noise against her palms. Still clutching her wrap closed with her one hand, she reaches with the other towards one of his own, lacing their fingers together. Her expression is light, but impossibly determined.

A grin transforms her features, taking over her countenance as her lips part her face and the corners of her eyes crinkle. It’s infectious, and his heart begins beating wildly for an entirely different reason than before.

“Thank you,” Mac says, turning back momentarily to where the driver is still standing.

Will watches the people — some making their way to Times Square, others ostensibly to other warmer and less-crowded locations — striding past them. Tonight, he thinks, they might be able to get by as anonymous. Then he is quickly disabused of that notion when he notices a fortysomething woman pretending to take a picture of a friend less than five feet away from them.

The snow has mostly been cleared away — probably by a member of Tiffany’s harried maintenance staff — but he still holds her tightly as they walk into the building.

In less than ten minutes, she proves herself right.

After the manager disappears into the back to run his Amex, he pulls the ring out its black velvet box, gets down on one knee, and does the whole thing properly.

Mac just laughs and tells him to get up before he hurts himself. “There’s no need to be polite, Billy.”

Not that is stops him from getting the damn thing on her finger, admittedly transfixed at the sight of five carats of brilliant round cut diamond nestled in close to her knuckle. _I need to be able to lift my hand,_ she said. _Fuck that,_ he said. Ignoring the way his knees protest, he rises and wraps his arms around her just intending to look at her — after all, the manager will be back any moment with his card and a slip to sign. But MacKenzie has other ideas, tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck and pulling him down for a fierce kiss that lasts for mere seconds but registers in his mind as at least several sparkling hours.

He gets her back in the limo, pushing her to lay on her back on the seat as they inch along the last ten blocks to the AWM building. Tracing her bottom lip with his tongue, he sets to inching the neckline of her dress down to reveal the transparent lace of her bra underneath, intending to tease her nipples into rosy buds. Or better yet, taste them through lace, his tongue rolling over the textured fibers — Mac provides a much better outlet for his oral fixation than smoking ever could.

Fingers clenching in his hair, she holds him tightly against her, angling her mouth for a better fit.

Moaning, he slides his tongue into her mouth and dispatches a hand to go searching under her skirt for the sheer, high-waisted boy shorts so he can attend to what is underneath them.  

Unerringly, his fingers find her clit, and minutes later she’s gasping and arching under him.

Pulling back so that he can look at her, he watches her face and chest flush pink and her eyes clear and settle. Her lips, swollen and red, fold up at the corners in a satisfied smile.

“And now you expect me to be able to walk?” she asks, chest heaving.

Her fingers leave his hair to clutch at the front of his shirt.

Will licks his lips, considering the situation. “I might have a problem with that myself.”

Gently extracting his fingers from her folds, and then her skirt, he brings them to his mouth. Mac’s pupils dilate, her eyes tracking to his lips as he sucks the taste of her off his fore and middle fingers. Savors it, really, abandoning the idea of ignoring his own arousal throbbing in his trousers.

With a ragged exhale, he sits up.

“Need help?” she asks, already dropping down onto the floor, and kneeling.

“Um.”

Breathing hard, he looks to the partition again. Closed, like it’s been all night. Then he looks out onto the street, trying to gauge where they are, how much time they might have. Before he can formulate a guess, however, Mac is undoing the button of his fly and carefully dragging the zipper down over his erection.

Pulling him out of his boxers, she bites her lip. In the faint golden light, her eyes glow, and they’re looking right at his face. Waiting, intent. His thighs tense under her touch; she wraps a hand around him, and tugs, wrist twisting. Bending to take him into her mouth, she murmurs, “Just don’t mess up my hair.”

Fingers digging into her shoulders, he tries his best.

Her lips suction down tight, her tongue flicking and swirling and her hands chasing her movements as her head bobs in his lap.

“Fucking _hell_ , MacKenzie,” he hisses, trying to keep his hips from torqueing up off the seat.

She doesn’t stop.

At least not until he is very desperately trying to not shout as his orgasm swells up and overcomes him, his hands finding themselves in her hair despite his best efforts. Chanting her name in a voice that is a few octaves lower than usual, he cracks his eyes open wide enough to watch as MacKenzie swallows around his softening member.

Trying to regain his senses, he continues watching her as she climbs back up onto the seat next to him, reaches for her bag, and primly applies a fresh coat of lipstick before adjusting her dress.

“Shit.”

Giggling, she replaces the cap of the lipstick tube and puts it away. “Better?”

He blinks at her. Then starts putting himself back together, fastening his pants and tucking his shirt back in, smoothing out the wrinkles.

“Do we really have to go the party?” Will asks.

If they time this right, they could be getting into bed just as he’s ready and able to perform round two.

But as if on cue, the limousine pulls over.

Mac looks at him sternly. Her expression is mitigated by her fussing over his hair and clothes, but she the look she gives him is a stern one nevertheless. “They’re our family. I think you can make it to midnight.”

“I really might not.”

“You survived three years. I think you’ll be fine.”

He sighs. “You’d be surprised how quickly one can become accustomed to being able to roll over and find himself a ready and willing fiancé, already naked and eager.”

“Eager?” Mac arches an eyebrow, reaching for her wrap.

At the same time, he reaches for his coat, and pulls it on. “What would you call that little display a few minutes ago?”

Smiling innocently, she yanks at the handle on the car door, and then pushes it open.

“Come on, let’s go show this thing off to everyone.”

“You know, they’re going to take credit for the whole thing.” He stays her with a hand on her waist, getting out of the car before her so he can assist her out of it again — high heels of course. Mac might trust stilettos and as much as he can appreciate all that they do for her legs, he doesn’t like the concept of Mac walking on them over ice. “Because of the mistletoe. Tess, Tamara, Kendra, Maggie. They’re all going to take credit for everything, because of that damn branch they hung all over the place.”

Pretending to contemplate what he just said (he should… do something, he doesn’t know what) she leans into his chest. “They sort of have a right to.”

“I would have kissed you! For other reasons!”

“Yeah.”

Her smile grows wry.

“I would have!” he protests, nimbly maneuvering her across the slick concrete to the entrance of the AWM building. By rote, they both reach for their security passes, and swipe in. Mac doesn’t let go of his arm the entire time.

“I know, honey,” she says as they step into the elevator. “You came to rescue me from a horrible death, freezing into a block of ice in the break room. It was very noble, taking a risk like that wearing loafers,” she teases. “The mistletoe had no part to play in things at all.”

A habit already solidified, they instinctively reach for the other’s hand.

They begin their ascent.

For no particular reason, Will thinks the past five days have been the longest he’s been away from the newsroom since April. Hell, since April he’s even been coming in on the weekends. Showing his face for a few hours every Saturday and Sunday. Showing his face mostly in Mac’s office, but regardless.

“I wanted to marry you from the day I met you,” he confesses, squeezing her fingers.

Eyes softening, she brings their hands up to her chest. “You know, you’ve never really explained why.”

Will cannot quite pinpoint why, but he’s nervous.

Or maybe he hasn’t been excited about anything for so long that his body is relaying excitement as anxiety.

“I feel less afraid. When I’m with you,” he explains quietly. “You’re the only person who’s ever made me feel fearless.”

For a few seconds it looks like Mac is considering a response — her mouth forms over a few silent words, before she shuts it again, settling on resting her head against his shoulder.

The elevator comes to a stop, and with a muted _ding_ the doors slide open.

Mac’s heels click against the tile as they step into the elevator lobby; they can hear the party already. Top 40 type music and nondescript voices piled atop one another, clinking glasses and the occasional _pop_ of a champagne bottle being opened. Will examines Mac’s eyes for any trace of alcohol consumption at their last party and finds none. Rather, she looks like she’s waiting for him.

Waiting for him to do _what_ , he has no idea.

“Alright,” he says, leading her towards the bullpen. “We’ll let the kids think they won.”

Mac giggles, and his chest is light.

They don’t take three steps inside before Tess hones in on them, rising from her spot perched on top of Neal’s desk, and exclaiming—

_“Oh my God, Will—”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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